Remains of Yasser Arafat reburied after poison test

The remains of Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, have been reburied
and samples were taken to be tested for signs he was poisoned.

9:08AM GMT 27 Nov 2012

"The operation is finished, the tomb has been resealed and the samples have been given to the French, Swiss and Russian experts," officials from the Palestinian commission investigating Arafat's death said.

Palestinian officials had originally planned a military ceremony to accompany the reburial of the remains after their exhumation.

But sources said the samples were removed from the remains directly from the grave, so there was no need to rebury them in a new ceremony.

"The samples were taken from Arafat's remains from inside the grave and the samples were then transferred to the mosque," a Palestinian source said, referring to a building adjacent to the Muqataa presidential complex in Ramallah, from which Arafat once ruled.

The removal of the samples was conducted by a Palestinian doctor in the presence of experts from Switzerland, Russia and France. Palestinian officials were expected to give a press conference to discuss the process at 1200 GMT.

The investigation will cap eight years of speculation about whether the former president was murdered, as many Palestinians believe.

French judges in charge of the investigation arrived on Sunday in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Arafat's mausoleum stands in the grounds of the Muqataa complex, from which the late leader ruled and where President Mahmoud Abbas has his headquarters.

Rumours and speculation have surrounded Mr Arafat's death ever since a quick deterioration of his health before he died at the Percy military hospital near Paris in November 2004 at the age of 75.

Doctors were unable at the time to say what killed the Palestinians' first democratically-elected president and an autopsy was never performed, at his widow Suha's request.

But many Palestinians believed he was poisoned by Israel – a theory that gained ground in July when Al-Jazeera reported Swiss findings showing abnormal quantities of the radioactive substance polonium on Arafat's personal effects.

France opened a formal murder inquiry in late August at Suha's request.

Polonium was the substance that killed Russian ex-spy and fierce Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Tawfiq Tirawi, head of the Palestinian team investigating Arafat's death, said the tomb will be opened, samples taken and a reburial ceremony held all on the same day.

An official statement is expected at the end of the process.

The samples will then be flown to laboratories in the three countries involved, with results expected within several months.

Some experts, however, have questioned whether anything conclusive will be found because polonium has a short life and dissipates quicker than some other radioactive substances.

And Jean-Rene Jourdain, deputy head of human protection at the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), cautioned it would take several weeks of analysis to be sure that the traces were man-made polonium rather than just coincidental contamination by naturally-occurring polonium.

"Even if traces of polonium are found, it doesn't mean that they are man-made," the French nuclear expert told AFP on Monday.